Sorry for the long downtime. My previous host went poof. I have no idea what happened.

As such, that puts an absolute answer on what to do with the old forum data: Lose it.
Yup. The forums are gone. I’m not sure how far back the last backup of it is, but I don’t have a recent one. As such, we’re free to start with an all new forum/communication channel. More on that soon.

This is an entirely new server with completely new installations. The links have been reshuffled a bit but I added some mappings so things should move over fairly seamlessly; always expect the occasional hiccups, though.

A huge thanks is owed to the folks at CreeperHost for hosting me. I should also apologize to them for dragging my feet on getting everything moved over. They’ve put up with me through that and even helped me out. 😀 You guys rock!

I’ve also set up a new wiki for Mystcraft. I’m not sure signups are working, so give it a test and let me know.

I had actually moved over everything but the forums, so that’s the only thing lost. Not my first choice of thing to lose, but there it is. I’ll see about getting some kind of forum solution up in the near future.

(This post was written some time in August but never made it to “Published” for some reason. Here it is now. :P)

While playing with Trello, I realized that archived lists are not viewable unless returned to the board. I tried playing with archiving the cards independently, but that just gives you a list of all archived cards… not so useful.

Since I’d like to leave an archive of what was completed when and make it publicly viewable, I tried to find some solution to this. The best I could find/come up with is to use two boards; one for upcoming and one for completed. Thus the Mystcraft Trello board will stay about as it has been in terms of roadmap, but now a new board exists to show the releases.

I think the process for this will be roughly the same, where I move completed tasks to a list as I do them, but now I’ll move that whole list to another board when I release it.

The maven repo is up and running again! 😀 Whoo!
I have some bug fix builds for you all. Nothing monumental just yet, but progress has been made. I’ll be looking at the instability system rewrite (see the Trello Board) next, and debating the order in which to update Mystcraft and LookingGlass to a more current version of Minecraft.

Still getting back into things, but it’s getting there. The progress on the server helps a lot.

Sometime late April, when I was starting my return to modding, I tried making a build only to find that my maven repo was gone. Guess that happens when one is away for half a year.
Outside of the loss of data I wasn’t too worried; the community around Minecraft has a number of wonderful elements, and one of those is those groups willing to provide productive modders and creators with hosting so we can focus on making cool things. Really, every group that is willing to do this is awesome for it. 😀

I’ve ended up with two such groups offering to help. This puts me in the uncomfortable situation of needing to choose which one I partner with. I have no one to blame for that but myself, though.

Almost entirely out of personal preference stemming from the fact that I know more people there, I’ve decided to partner with CreeperHost. I’ve known many of them a long time, now, and they have some really impressive hardware they are going to let me use. Thanks, guys!

This new server should be a really cool thing for my website and stuff. Ultimately I’ll be moving all of my website and server usage over to the VPS they are providing me, but for now it just has a maven repo set up on it. This means my maven repo should be back in working order soon… though it doesn’t have the old builds on it for now. I’ll see about putting them up if anyone wants them, but since I was the one to find out the maven repo was gone I expect everyone who wanted to use it already had.

As always, I am slowed by my eternal enemy: Time. (See what I did there?) How fast I manage to get all of this done depends on how much time I have to spend on doing it. Wish me luck.
In the coming weeks I’d like to put more information up for how others could help me out. The more people engaged in seeing Mystcraft and LookingGlass evolve and develop the faster I’ll be able to create things. 😀

I just pushed the first Mystcraft build since November, and it felt really cathartic. 😀

I must admit, I was a little worried about whether I’d remember how to do anything, particularly with the Gradle build system. Turns out, I don’t seem to have forgotten any of it. Which is good, because lots of it has forgotten itself.

For starters, I had to set my dev environment up on my new desktop PC. Fortunately, I remember all of the setup commands (probably through having to run them so much in the past) and had this up and running in little to no time. I also have the old setup running on the older computer beside me, so I can reference it easy for the really specific values and things (Eclipse run configurations, anyone?).
Then I went and did a bit of debugging and fixing. The longest challenge was finding the fastest way to check a srgname these days. Still MCP bot, so I had to install an IRC client (this computer is REALLY new).
I made my fix and went to build… and it failed on trying to pull the LookingGlass API from the maven. A little investigating revealed that my maven repo server was just gone. I spoke with Nick over at ReasonantHost and he’s already getting me fixed up with a new one. Thanks guys!
Regardless, I was still out a maven repo, so I just manually bypassed that and ‘viola!’, I have a shiny new build.

It wasn’t easy, and that’s what made it feel so good. It wasn’t really hard, either, which probably helped.

Now, the build itself is fairly minimal; I just made a single change to try and deal with an error I’ve only ever seen once. The idea was that it was a reasonably straightforward issue that I could tackle directly and push a build for. My goal was and remains to get back into modding at a reasonably slow pace. Leaping in head first is fun, but I don’t want to fry myself again so soon after returning.

So here’s to the return of Mystcraft and LookingGlass.
-XComp

EDIT: Whoops! Missed my usual end text:
Mystcraft is available from CurseForge.

OK, I know it’s been a lot more than five days. And, no, you weren’t holding Helm’s Deep during this time (which is probably for the best).
Just let me have my Gandalf moment, OK?

It’s been a while. This post is to serve as a recap and explanation as to why. It’s also the announcement of my return, I suppose.

About a year ago (Jan of last year) I was in a bit of a predicament; my residence permit to live in Finland was to expire as February ended. Since I didn’t want this to happen, I needed a source of income to apply for a new permit.
At this time I had been trying to start a PhD for some time. I had managed to find some potential supervisors, but funding was much more scarce. It never pulled through.
So, as February rolled around I basically entered panic mode. Bailing on getting a PhD position, I simply tried for any research or teaching position I could get. Fortunately, this tactic worked much better, as someone who recognized my name called me up wanting me to build cool things for him. I counted myself very lucky.
so, for the past year (Feb to Feb) I was working as a researcher on an interesting augmented reality project based out of Padova Italy. The work was interesting, the people were fun, and I learned a lot. I don’t think I could have asked for more given the circumstances.

Some of the more attentive folks might be able to correlate March with a sudden boost to my modding time and productivity. Essentially, I suddenly had the time and comfort to enable me to be more creative. Unfortunately it didn’t last. Come August I was informed that my contract would not be renewed when it expired in Feb. This coupled with the project needing to finish soon and the theatre group I’m in starting it’s latest production (in Sept; performed last week) pretty much killed all that time and desire to work on my personal projects.
And that’s when the big gap started.

I managed a few sporadic fixes and updates since, but I honestly had some difficulty wanting to work on anything due to the stress I was already under. I will honestly tell you that making a mod as big as Mystcraft is stressful not for the work doing it, but for dealing with the community around it. I didn’t want to interact with that source of stress, and so I distanced myself from all of it.

Leap forward to January of this year. I, once again, found myself with an expiring residence permit. I’d been doing the same as the previous round, trying to start my PhD, but the climate for that is even worse now than before.
And so I bailed on academia and went looking for a job at a game company.

In the end, come late Jan/early Feb, I secured a contract with Mindfield Games here in Finland, and I could not be happier. It has been so much fun and is exactly the kind of work I love doing and am well suited for. The peopel I’m working with are awesome as well.

Thus ends the Workplace Saga. At least for the foreseeable future, as this contract is indefinite. 😀

However, February and March ended up a very busy time for me. Between the new job and the theatre production (which I’d now been upgraded to both a main character and the producer for) I simply didn’t have any real free time. (One thing to another, my life is.)
The shows (Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards! adapted by Stephen Briggs) occurred last week. I spent Easter weekend recovering.

And now I’m back to being able to do fun stuff.

There’s a small hill of things I’ve been putting off that I’ll be working through (including setting up/finishing building a computer I got over Christmas) but I’m looking forward to getting back into the groove of Mystcraft and LookingGlass. It’ll be slow for a while, but I’m on my way back.

(This post is very “personal life” oriented. Steer clear if you don’t care.)
I’ve been staying pretty quiet about my hiatus. It wasn’t planned (or I’d have given warning) and has lasted much longer than I’d have liked.

The reasons are pretty mundane. I’m not dying (any faster than usual; at least such that I can tell). I’m not sick. I’m not even getting married or something significant like that (I’d probably have mentioned that if I were).

I’m just working full time on a project (for work at the Uni) that has been in crunch mode since about August. Keeps one busy.
At the same time, my motivation has been a little upended. This has to do partially with work as well, but the reverse direction.

About August (what is it with August this year?), I was informed that at the end of my current contract I cannot be guaranteed funding. This isn’t the problem most people would expect for me. While, ya, not being paid is problematic, I could try to get money from other sources (I could mod more and depend on Patreon again). The problem for me is residence permit. In order for me to get a permit to live in Finland I need to have an income. Thus, no funding means I can’t get a residence permit beyond my current contract.
I don’t think I need to say that the possibility of being kicked out of the country one considers home is a bit stressful.

Thus I’ve been looking for other ways to stay here in Finland. The first looks were how to stay in academia, but I’ve largely given up on that. There isn’t any money in the universities here and most of them are in a recruiting freeze because of it. At this point I’m trying to get a job “in the real world/industry.” It’s made a little more complex by wanting to stay in Finland.

I have some time, still, before “Volcano Day,” but it’s still stressful to the point of deterring me from working on Mystcraft.

I just felt that you all deserved to know why Mystcraft stopped updating around August and where I’ve been. Thank you to everyone and I hope I can be back on playing around with Mystcraft fairly soon.
Cheers!
-XCompWiz

The younger of you may not get that reference.
Those that do may not appreciate it. 😛

Something that comes up really often for me is modpacks. Part of this is that Mystcraft is constantly inundated with modpack requests, but also because I interact with the community on this point. I enjoy providing tools and options to people building interesting packs.
So this post about modpacks will be to modders, not pack creators.

I think of modpacks as something akin to a remix. Taking things which already exist and arranging them to make something new. This is what I think a good modpack should be these days.*
Now, this squarely sets me as one of the modders who wants to build my mod(s) such as to allow easy remixing. Thus I provide lots of configs and options and IMC tools and try to make things as adaptive and adjustable as possible. I realize not all modders see things this way, and that some don’t want to allow for that level of customization. That’s really up to them. However, I would implore everyone to consider it.
You don’t have to make it as easy as a config option -IMC mechanics work well for modpack creators-, but allowing for mechanics to be added, tweaked, and disabled permits pack creators to produce even more creative things.

Some thoughts to consider:
You never can control how a user uses any software you write. Ever. Ultimately, how a user wishes to use what you have created is up to them.
If you are creating a mod, you are doing precisely this to someone else’s mechanics; you are modifying and extending the base game. Disallowing others to do that to what you have created is your right, but it is when we build on others’ work that the most interesting things occur. Letting others build on your work can lead to exciting things. Sometimes those contributions can be integrated into your work, and that saves you a lot of work!
Enabling remixing and control over how things work at any level helps build a stronger (,better, and more friendly) community. I know that the MC community is often… well, not as great as we’d like. The trick is to insulate yourself with the better of them (and ignore the rest). This helps with that.

Just my two cents on the topic. I use mods to produce the game I want to play. I like when those mods are balanced and interact well with each other, but sometimes they don’t do that out of the box.
Providing the tools and options to fix that balance to your community (not necessarily to average users, but to some level of the community) allows others to do that balance work for you and strengthens your community.

Cheers!

*There are the two cases of packs outside this. Packs for smallish communities, which I think should be private, and packs for media content creators, which I allow to be public so that streamers and YouTubers can let their audience play along.

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